A Sun’s Influence on a Galaxy of Stars

‘Dancing Around the Bride,’ at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Dancing Around the Bride A Jasper Johns box for Merce Cunningham’s “Walkaround Time,” in this show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Just under the wire, I’ve found a top candidate for favorite museum show of the year in a sparkling piece of curatorial choreography called “Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. An ensemble performance entirely of stars, with an elusive sun, Marcel Duchamp, at the center, it focuses on a transformative moment in American Modernism when a heroic view of art ended, and another view, cool, wry and brainy, began.

The show also does double duty as a late addition to the 2012 Cage centenary year, though in that category New York has a superb entry of its own in “John Cage: The Sight of Silence,” at the National Academy Museum in Manhattan. A survey of works on paper produced by the composer in the decade or so before his death in 1992, this show is as clean and fresh as first thing in the morning, the time of day in which Cage, with his sweet-tempered Zen-ness, seemed perpetually to live.

“Dancing Around the Bride” captures this mood too, but it has a complicated story to tell, a layered tale of accidental meetings, vital exchanges of information and crucial harmonizing — in duos, trios, quartets, a quintet. Much of the main action takes place in the 1940s and ’50s, when Abstract Expressionism, romantic and ponderous, dominated the scene, spawning a kind of resistance movement of cultural figures trying to stay clear of its shadow.

One of these figures was Cage, who in 1940, already well aware of Dada, Duchamp and Buddhism, was messing around with musical orthodoxy, organizing percussion-only concerts and investigating the difference, or lack of it, between music and noise. In 1942 he and Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), an experimental dancer and choreographer, became lovers and collaborators, creating multimedia performances shaped by the play of chance.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the two men met the precocious young Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who was doing, among other things, blank white paintings intended to capture the ephemeral play of ambient light and passing shadows. The three solidified their friendship at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where they collaborated on a blowout campus event, sometimes called the first Happening, which included improvised Cunningham dances, a score and a lecture (partly silent) by Cage, and big white paintings for sets.

Rauschenberg soon found a partner of his own in Jasper Johns (born in 1930), and they too did radical work, together and separately. Rauschenberg’s messy, loquacious painting-sculpture hybrids, called combines, turned individual artworks into mini-theaters, while Mr. Johns’s encaustic paintings of American flags and maps were like embalmed reproductions of the originals, eerily bridging the art-life divide.

At the center of all this activity, less than a direct source but more than a mere reference — and largely invisible — was Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). For some American artists, he had the status of a myth, a chess-obsessed Frenchman who, early in the 20th century, had blown traditional aesthetics out of the water by saying that ideas were worth more than things, and everyday things — a snow shovel, a urinal — could be art.

And by the 1940s, this myth was living in New York. Cage saw him around the town, but kept an awed distance for years. Mr. Johns initially knew him only secondhand. Reading in a review that his own work had affinities with Duchamp’s, he traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late 1950s to see the permanent Duchamp display that had opened there a few years earlier, with the artist’s monumental masterpiece, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even,” also called “The Large Glass” (1915-23), at its center.

More than half a century later, “The Large Glass” is still in place where Mr. Johns initially saw it, though the atmosphere around it has changed. Duchamp has gone from being a cult figure to attaining recognition as one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century. And “The Large Glass” itself, at least for the next few months or so, is just one piece of art among many in the exultation of influence that is “Dancing Around the Bride.”

The main exhibition is in the museum’s special exhibition galleries and is announced, with a gesture of all-American overkill that Duchamp might have loved, by a lighted marquee.

The organizers, Carlos Basualdo, curator of contemporary art, and Erica F. Battle, a curatorial assistant, have divided the work by thematic motifs shared by all five of the show’s artists, moving back and forth through time.

Photo

In “John Cage: The Sight of Silence,” at the National Academy Museum, Cage’s “New River Watercolor Series I (#3).”Credit
John Cage Trust at Bard College

In the opening section, the 1912 Duchamp painting “Bride,” a precursor to “The Large Glass,” is paired with a suite of brush-and-ink variations on the same subject by Mr. Johns — a longtime Duchamp collector; many works in the show belong to him — in 1986.

Examples of the creative use of chance also span decades. For his 1913 “Three Stoppages,” Duchamp dropped threads onto pieces of wood, affixed them where they fell and cut the wood to match their curves. Adopting a similar gesture, Rauschenberg dropped pieces of cloth on a lithography plate in 1974, and Cage dropped inked strings onto paper in 1980.

Controlled accident isn’t the whole story here. A sheet of jotted notations for Cunningham’s 1956 dance “Suite for Five” is a hurricane of words and diagrams. The choreographer may well have thrown the “I Ching” to determine his dancers’ moves, but the movement of his own hand on paper looks frenzied.

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Naturally, there’s a section devoted to chess, which Duchamp, a tournament player, was mad for. And there’s reason to see his entire career as a game of minutely calibrated board moves. But the show really takes off in a wide, high-ceilinged central gallery, given over to the subject of performance.

With an audiovisual installation commissioned by the museum from the French artist Philippe Parreno, the space is set up as a theater in the round, with a square platform stage in the center, a piano nearby (another one welcomes you in the lobby), and bleacherlike seats behind. Prerecorded scores by Cage and the composer David Behrman play periodically, and the stage itself offers a remarkable sight: a set of large, semi-transparent boxes painted with organic shapes that seem to float like fish in aquariums.

The shapes are familiar: they’re all derived from “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” And they were painted in 1968 by Mr. Johns, who designed the boxes as a modular set for the Cunningham dance “Walkaround Time.”

And walk about them we do. They form the bride, or one version of her, that the show as a whole dances around.

And it really does dance. The walls surrounding the stage hold sensationally dynamic paintings by Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp himself. Cage’s music is in the air. At various points during the remaining run of the show, live dancers, former members of Cunningham’s company, will perform here.

They weren’t around when I visited, but plenty of other performers were. Seen through a Duchampian eye, all the visitors moving through and around the exhibition become part of an art-meets-life pageant. We are all, it seems, born to the stage, and we are performing the role of museumgoers to perfection.

That would be the view from a Cageian eye too. And performance, action as art, is the essence of the exhibition of works on paper, mostly watercolors, at the National Academy Museum. Cage wrote visually striking scores throughout his career, but came late to visual art. Once he found it, though, it became a preoccupation. It allowed him to continue using chance as a tool to filter out taste and personal feeling from art, though less stringently than he did in music. It put him in collaborative situations of a kind he thrived on. It let him immerse in nature.

Most of the work in the show was done at the Mountain Lake Workshop in rural Blacksburg, Va., where Cage went often in the 1980s and ’90s. In that relaxed environment, he felt free to paint and print with unorthodox implements, like feathers and stones, and in unlikely mediums, like fire. The show, organized by Marshall N. Price, curator of Modern and contemporary art at the academy, and Ray Kass, director of the Mountain Lake Workshop, pays homage to Cage’s conscientious eccentricity: the hanging of the works was determined by rolls of dice, a method that put some pictures up near the ceiling, and others down near the floor.

It all works. Some of the pictures are nearly impossible to see, but then again, with faint graphite lines, smoke stains and water-clear washes, they’re hard to see even close up. And that’s exactly what Cage wanted: art that made us, in our role as museumgoers, look very, very hard at the line, always moving, between art and nothing-there.

Correction: December 8, 2012

An art review on Friday about “Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and two picture captions with it misstated part of the title of a Merce Cunningham dance for which Jasper Johns designed boxes for the set. It is “Walkaround Time,” not “Walkabout Time.”

Correction: December 11, 2012

An art review on Friday about “Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, misspelled the surname of a composer whose work is heard in a recording in an audiovisual installation by the French artist Philippe Parreno. He is David Behrman, not Berman.

“Dancing Around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp” continues through Jan. 21 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street; (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. “John Cage: The Sight of Silence” runs through Jan. 13 at the National Academy Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 369-4880, nationalacademy.org; it travels to the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Va., Feb. 15 to May 19; taubmanmuseum.org.

A version of this review appears in print on December 7, 2012, on Page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: A Sun’s Influence On a Galaxy of Stars. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe